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From Huw Price and Ken Wharton at Aeon:
Over the past forty years, a lot of ingenuity has gone into designing experiments to test the quantum predictions on which Bell’s result depends. Quantum mechanics has passed them all with flying colours. Just last year, three new experiments claimed to close almost all the remaining loopholes. ‘The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the “spooky action-at-a-distance” that [Einstein] famously hated… is an inherent part of the quantum world,’ as Nature put it.
Our authors propose another solution: Retrcausality, or the present an future can shape the past:
Some readers may raise a more global objection to retrocausality. Ordinarily, we think that the past is fixed while the future is open, or partly so. Doesn’t our freedom to affect the future depend on this openness? How could we affect what was already fixed? These are deep philosophical waters, but we don’t have to paddle out very far to see that we have some options. We can say that, according to the retrocausal proposal, quantum theory shows that the division between what is fixed and what is open doesn’t line up neatly with the distinction between past and future. Some of the past turns out to be open, too, in whatever sense the future is open.
To understand what sense that is, we’d need to swim out a lot further. Is the openness ‘out there in the world’, or is it a matter of our own viewpoint as agents, making up our minds how to act? Fortunately, we don’t really need an answer: whatever works for the future will work for the past, too. Either way, the result will be that our naive picture of time needs to be revised in the light of a new understanding of physics – a surprising conclusion, perhaps, but hardly a revolutionary one, more than a century after special relativity wrought its own changes on our understanding of space and time. More.
Most likely the whole system of causation would collapse under the weight of constant revisions.
See also: Economist: Can time go backward?
Is time an elemental part of nature?
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